​I’ve chosen not to comment much on the astrology of this summer, whether in anticipation of the solar eclipse or the undulating wake of it.  Not on retrogrades, not on Mars’ movement past its fall in Cancer, not on my own fleeting observations of this or that.

I’ve done so for an array of reasons.  Sometimes I allow my life to get in the way of my life. 

Sometimes I get slammed with readings and end up feeling less compelled to wax more about the planets and slices of sky.  Sometimes I enjoy the writing of other astrologers more than I care to publish mine.  Sometimes I feel the most salient points I can convey about the current skies have been better said by a friend or colleague whose work I adore!

I enjoy simply letting it all unfold.  Not maintaining consistent discipline in documenting my experiences or pushing symbolic interpretation of what I bear witness to.  It’s pleasant to let things be, to not always feel the need to name or to interpret.

It’s also a diabolical blessing, letting myself fail again and again at harmonizing some of my decisions with any of the ‘higher’ knowledge or wisdom I fancy myself to hold fragments of.  Whether it’s knowledge expressed through an astrological lens, bar talk, a Sunday morning service, you name it… we all fall short of living our principles and virtues as completely as we might wish, no matter their aesthetic or cultural drapery.

The root of the word ‘diabolical’ is ‘diabolis’ — to divide from the symbol, to deliberately not harmonize your actions with what you perceive to be a meaningful sign, a push in fuller directions.  It can be so easy to lose yourself in the immediacy of an experience, perhaps in the impulse of a poor choice, only to awaken from the miasma and realize, ‘I totally knew better.’ 

These are some of the moments I most deeply feel aphorisms like ‘the gift is near to the wound’, or ‘the cobbler’s children have no shoes.’  We’re all capable of talking shop we run but don’t always live otherwise, projecting wisdom we fall short of embodying.

It’s so strange to look back on the past year, the past two years in particular, and see how choices I’ve made and bigger things still have happened to me in ways that mirror the symbolism of astrological transits across my natal chart.  Things I’ve come to understand more in immediate retrospect than at the times I could have steered events or acted more wisely.

I think of how Jupiter in Libra transiting my Twelfth House (of ‘Self Undoing’) seems to herald for me yet another increasingly beautiful relationship, this past year with a woman whose nature and locality I semi-consciously knew beforehand would force me out of patterns (of career, of income, of play) I was already outgrowing.  The prelude to a fuller ‘rebirth’ of how I interface with the world, as Jupiter enters Scorpio on October 10th and so my First House.

We know the languages we’re fluent in because they can help us just as much, if not sometimes more than we can help anyone else through them.  Sometimes the truths you bring to the world are just for you, nothing to be wielded over another’s head, whether as a weapon, a purported blessing or both.

[ Artwork by Augustine Dunn ]